I’ve been recently messing around with the various drawing tools in Harmony, and while the vector brush and pencil are great, I much prefer the more organic look of the bitmap brush. I’m currently experimenting with using bitmap line art for a nice sketchy look, while combining it with a vector color layer for fills that I can still easily adjust. The fill bucket tends to get confused with the bitmap lines a fair bit, but with strokes and whatnot I think that can be worked around.
So I’m curious, does anyone else use a similar method? Is it common/uncommon? Are there any major hangups or problems that often occur when mixing bitmap lines and vector fills like this? I’m looking forward to trying it more, if I can get the hang of fills and strokes I think it will turn out well, so I’m interested how others view this method!
The fill bucket tends to get confused with the bitmap lines a fair bit, but with strokes and whatnot I think that can be worked around.
I’m not sure how you’re “mixing” bitmap lines with vector fills. Are you using the Line Art layer for bitmap drawing and the Colour Art for vector fill?
I think the best process is to create a layer with Line Art as bitmap and Colour Art as vector. After you clean your animation on the Line Art layer you can Create Colour Art From Line Art via the icon on the Select Tool Tool Properties, Drawing menu or shortcut (default is *). That will create strokes (invisible lines) on the Colour Art layer (or another sublayer, this can be configured) which you can use to fill with colour, having line (bitmap) separated from colour (vector). If your bitmap drawing is very rough, has open lines, etc., you might need some cleaning or closing of lines on the Colour Art layer before you’re able to paint.
Is this how you’re doing it?
This should be common on arthouse short films or series that require a particular organic look, but I don’t think it’s much used in commercial work such as TV series or feature films.
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Luis Canau
Yep, that’s the method I’m using. Since I use sketchy bitmap brushes with varying opacity, the vector color layer tends to leave gaps in the strokes once I copy the line art. Still experimenting with ways to make the process smoother, drawing darker lines and trying to close gaps more thoroughly during the line art phase might improve the flow.